Our Annual Family Photo Book

Surprise! Along with crown molding the heck outta a few more rooms, here’s what’s going on around here these days (and there’s a big ol’ post coming your way as soon as it’s cleaned up and we have after photos for ya):

Meanwhile, last year is soooo, well, last year. But before we bid it a formal adieu, let’s get into one of our favorite annual happenings:

Yup, we’re currently experiencing a resurgence of 2012 love thanks to the recent arrival of the 2012 Petersik Family Yearbook.

We love ordering a photobook each January (which we share every year) to encapsulate the previous year’s favorite photos. We were big fans of the first one that we bought back in 2010 from , so we’ve stuck with them each year since so that all of the books look similar (, we love the quality). So with the addition of yearbook number three, we’re finally starting to have a nice little collection going.

This year’s book was a bit late in coming because I’m very strategic about ordering from MyPublisher. I like to use up the maximum allowed number of pages (100). But since you pay per page (after the first 35) it usually costs over $100 per book. BUT, I get MyPublisher’s promotional emails every week (maybe I signed up on their site, I don’t remember) and I know that they regularly run a “FREE EXTRA PAGES” discount. So even though I put the finishing touches on our book in early January (I was quite eager this year), I camped out for weeks while I waited for them to run that particular promotion. And I’m so glad I did. Boom, $80 saved.

Just like we did with last year’s book, we opened with a “highlights” page to sort of summarize the year in a few bullet points.

But rather than just re-type them for you guys, we thought we’d share some of the corresponding pages inside. So here goes nothing!

One new thing that we did this year was also to include a special Instagram section at the back. Since 2012 was the year that we got started addicted, it was only fitting that we dedicated a few pages at the end of our family yearbook to some of our favorite little candid snapshots.

Now the only bummer is that we’ve gotta wait another ten months or so ’til we get to make the next book in the series. Oh well. I guess in the meantime we’ll just try to take lots of photos. Somehow I don’t think we’ll have an issue with that…

Oh and I think this shot really demonstrates the value of these books as a way to document your life year by year.

Three photo albums wouldn’t be nearly as thin and easily storable or displayable (their pages are thicker and their bindings are huge). But we imagine that even after a decade of yearbook-making we’ll be able to easily store (or display) ten or more of them in a nice little stack, as opposed to a decade’s worth of photo albums, which could easily take up an entire shelf.

And when it comes to cost, hello money in my pocket.

If you do the math, 100 pages of photos with an average of 7 photos per page = 700 photos. Which is a TON of photos for each year, but we’re snap-happy like that. And it usually costs around 15 cents per picture on sites like Target or Shutterfly (that’s their best “bulk” price), so for 700 prints it would be $105! But you’d still need to buy albums if you were doing it the old school way (at Target they’re around $15 for each album, and they typically hold 200 photos, so to store 700 you’d need four albums! So to get a nice custom made book for $45.99 versus spending $165 for traditional prints & albums – well, we’re down.

You can read our original post from 2010 with a little more about in the first place along what we put in that album. And if you’ve got another system – or an alternate photo storage trick – we’d love to hear about it. Until then you can find us taking pictures. Lots and lots of pictures…

I do the same thing too, a yearly photobook for my nephew and all the things we do throughout the year. And I’m 100% with you on the “finally, it’s starting to look like a nice little stack of yearbooks.”
Only difference is that I’m a sucker for Shutterfly’s books. Disclaimer, I haven’t tried MyPublisher yet – but so far, out of Picaboo, Blurb and Shutterfly – I’m liking Shutterfly the best. (I work in the digital printing industry, so I’m kinda picky about this.)

Thanks for the heads up…I’m halfway thru my 2012 book on Blurb (don’t worry, I realize it’s March and I’m not done yet…) so I’m kind of committed, but I was looking for a good post on which of these services is best. Maybe next year I’ll go with Shutterfly.

Aw thanks Wendy! It usually takes a few hours of work over a few days (John will do Jan-April one night on the sofa after dinner and then pick it back up again and do a few more months in another few hours, etc). Hope it helps!

cool!! I recently made a photo book from shutterfly–for FREE!! yep–it was FREE!! well, except for the extra few pages I tacked on. but still, using a coupon from mycokerewards.com I made a 32 page photo book, hardcover, and delivered for like $8! :)
I never thought of making it an annual tradition–now I’ll have to take more photos!!!

I’m sure this is for design purposes but I notice you don’t use a lot of text. After going through a lot of my parent’s and grandparent’s old albums, I am a huge fan of text because I would love to know who all these people are (especially my aunts and uncles all grown up). When I see a photo book I’ve just made, it’s obvious who’s in the pictures, but 10-20 years down the road, it might be hard to decipher. We made a 75 birthday book for my grandma that incited a lot of debate over which cousin is which from pictures from the 1960s! :)

Oh yes, we use captions and stuff when we think we might forget something – most of the pages we shared were just pretty explanatory, so those are a bit more bare than some of the others with a big group of people for example :)

What a great idea! However, just curious, have you thought about ordering 2 yearbooks each year–one for you and Sherry to keep and one for Clara to have for when she grows up and leaves the house? Or if you were to have another kid, a third one, so Clara and her sibling would both be able to have a yearbook? Just thinking about the future! :-)

That’s really cute! Thankfully MyPUblisher keeps your file (and we download a copy of it too on our descktop) so we can order reprints whenever we’d like (for Grammy and TomTom and Nonna and Grandpa or even for Clara down the line – such a fun idea!).

Since it’s currently just my hubby and I, I always wait until I get a free photobook coupon through my email from Shutterfly. It’s usually like a $30 or $40 book that I only pay like 8 bucks in shipping for. I’ve made two which I’ve used to keep photos of our first year as a married couple and our Italian honeymoon, and my sister gave us one for our wedding of pictures from our rehearsal and her photos the day of our wedding. I love how thin they are and have them on our mantle. I’m thinking when we have kids I’ll start doing a yearbook too – it’s a great way to showcase each year! Thanks for all the tips and ideas. You guys rock!

Looking good! With the exception of the photo pages, are the other photos in your book taken on your real camera or are some of them iphone pics? I’ve been using my iphone almost exclusively to take photos and while uploading them to Facebook, the quality looks ok, sometimes when I print them, they aren’t the best. Just wondering how any of those iphone photos printed in your book. Thanks!

Most are taken with our real camera but many are iPhone pics too! We try not to do full pages of those (blowing them up makes them look pixelated) but in a grid of 4 or 6 or 8 they look just as clear so you can’t even tell which ones are phone pics. MyPublisher warns you if any photos are alarmingly low-res so you can have a choice to remove them or size them down, which is really helpful too!

Commenting after a long break. Got so caught up with life! :)Have made pic books of vacation trips before but not an entire yr’s worth of pics. Love the idea of these photo books. I’m so lazy when it comes to actually taking prints of all the photos. So this one is right up my alley. Totally gonna do it.

On my end just finished up a teeny weeny project, upgrading a $1 clearance bowl that I found at Marshalls. Think it turned out pretty cool.

I love how your books are different colors on the outside. We did one this year and love it! My kids keep going through it and asking when we are going on vacation again. Such a great way to capture memories.

Love your book and the layouts ! It such a good and easy way to look at these photos again. I make every year a book of my far-away-holiday and have lots of books now (all from the same manufacturer and I also wait each year for the discount !). It’s fun to go through these books from time to time and show to friends and family. I just wish it didn’t take so much time to make them… but the reward is great ! I just finished one and two more months and then I’m off to Japan and can start on the next one. Have fun taking pictures !

LOVE this idea. So much fun to have something to hold in your hands! I do photo book every year for my MIL, who doesn’t use (or cares to use) a computer. I really need to do one to have in our house now!

If and when you’re ever looking for actual prints, do yourself a favor and sign up for Snapfish alerts and wait for Penny Print deals (they come out a few times a year). At that time, I usually order about 200 photos for 2-dolla and can sometimes even layer on a promo code for free shipping.

I am a total photobook user! My to my Creative Memories Mother-In-Law’s chagrin. I haven’t used MyPublisher, because I usually just buy a deal online, but I used Picaboo for a road trip book, and it turned out awesome. Now I have one in the works with Photobin, so we’ll see how much I like their set up.
My 91 year old grandma is such a fan that she demanded a photo book for her Christmas present this year, even though for the last decade she has explicitly forbidden gifts.
Now I just have to get on it and do our yearbook for 2010-2012 before baby comes in May!

We do the exact same thing! I got a living social deal this January do do our 2012 version. Ours was pretty much entirely photos! I like your idea of year highlights in the front – may have to do that next year.

I think they rotate every week or two so probably not (by the time it arrived and we took pics they were onto another one) but it rotates all the time so if you sign up for their emails (maybe on their Facebook page) they’ll alert you which promotions they’re running each week and you can wait for it to come back around!

Very cute! We use Shutterfly for our family yearbooks as well since we already upload our pictures to our shutterfly.com family website each month. I’m planning to go back and make 2 more albums: one for all of our dating pictures and another for our married before kids pictures.

I love this idea and went back and made yearbooks for my sons first few years (as a single mama of one ALL my pictures are of my little guy). The only thing I kept thinking about is how it might be nice to add a CD in a little sleeve to the inside of the back cover with copies of all the photos used in the book! It would be a bit time consuming possibly but I remember being a kid and needing pictures for school projects and such so we just yanked the original printed copy from the old-school album and they didn’t always make it back to the album. Sometimes there were negatives to make a copy. Since you won’t be slicing up these pages maybe it would be helpful for future use to keep one disc of the photos with the album for easy printing/graduation/wedding slide shows etc as these books are the way Clara will reexperience many of these family memories.

This situation (removing prints from albums) inspired my photo storage system, which is to keep prints in photo storage boxes with dividers marking the “timeline.” I paid $2 per box at Michaels. Plus this way it was easy to take my husband’s childhood photos and interfile them with mine. Photos can easily be taken in and out for copying or, maybe in the future, kids’ school projects. I wait for 10-cent prints from Walgreens, announced in their emails.

Lovely photo book! So far we’ve been using Shutterfly because they ship to Canada. I need to see if MyPublisher would ship here as well.
PS. You guys should totally come to Montreal if you do another book tour :)

Yup, ship to Canada via Fedex. I think it’s about $16 for a classic book. They won’t ship orders together though so you can’t combine shipping to save costs. I was about 3/4 done my 2012 yearbook and my computer kinda crashed slightly and I lost most of my pages and the pictures were gone from the file…. insert sad, unhappy crying face here. So I have to start all over again. I’ve been putting it off.

I just ordered out fourth yearbook from shutterfly this week. It is so much better than photo albums. Besides taking up way less room, they are better looking. I love being able to add text and embellishments, choose my own designs and page layouts. I have also ordered from MyPublisher when I made a gift photobook for Father’s Day one year. Both good quality places.

I waited for a good sale too. Not as big a savings as you guys but $12 beats $45.

I’ve been scrapbooking for over ten years, and you are right, those books are HUGE (most of mine are about 2 inches thick)! Especially when it comes to scrapbooks which you fill with other trinkets and less pictures per page. I have done photo books of a few events but keep going back to my scrapbooks for overall (and to still scrapbook the photo book event). Once I have kids and get even more photo crazy I’m sure I might need to adjust. Maybe scrapbook for some great memorable pictures and photo books to fill with lots of pics for the year.

Love! I’ve been creating yearbooks since 2008 and I love looking through them occasionally, as does my family. I use Snapfish because I can upload directly from Flickr, which is where I store my photos. I also go through Ebates since they have up to 20% cash back at times! Plus Snapfish has great coupons as well. This year, I am trying to complete each month at the end of the month or I get really behind. I didn’t finish my 2011 yearbook until the middle of 2012. BAD BAD BAD! I also added an Instagram section last year.

It is really fun to look back and see how my book making skills have evolved. Even my husband, who isn’t big on nostalgia, loves looking at them when they arrive.

Beautiful work! I just finished my third photoyearbook as well–the first was a surprise Christmas gift for my wife, and it’s become an annual “surprise” tradition (but now, like yours, in January-February to include Christmas and take advantage of sales). I’ve yet to find an interface that is really satisfing for this journalism/PR/marketing guy, so thanks for the tip on MyPublisher!

I love this idea! I’ve been meaning to start on ours, we want to start with 2011 going forward since that was the year our little nugget was born… so thanks for posting this and essentially kicking my butt in gear. It’s March! Already?

I love how simple this can be – I’m more the type who likes to over complicate it with physical scrapbooking :) I’ve been using the Project Life system this year and love it, but cutting up paper and photos isn’t for everyone! I’m just a sucker for really nice patterned paper…

I know you mentioned you loved the quality…but I was wondering how much they’re handled? Do you let Clara paruse them like she would her books? I have seen some people with professional made books (Shutterfly though I think) and they fall apart after a few years (pages fall out of the bindings etc) so I LOVE the idea, but wouldn’t want to waste the money on something that fell apart. Traditional school year books always last forever, I want THAT quality :) Any advice?

They’re great! Clara can read them with us (that’s the rule just to be sure she doesn’t color in them or rip the pages) but I’d say that we’ve read our first and second one at least 50+ times with her and they look new. Just can’t drop them in water or eat over them or anything, but for normal page-turning stuff – even if done quite often – they’re great.

I just hit the purchase button on my book for my son’s first year (he’s 2 so I’m a smidge behind) and saw your guys posts not two minutes after. CraZAY! I saw your post about it last year and started the book, just never finished it. Like you all, I’m a little snap happy too – it truly is great solution. This is my first book and I ordered one for my mom as well – we both can’t wait to get it! You guys should get a referral discount ;0)

I love photobooks. Adoramapix has the nicest ones I have seen out of the 8-10 companies I have tried. i do my pages in photoshop and then can just drop them in the book once I am ready to order. I do square pages so I can do 12×12 or 8×8 which most companies carry now.

Cara, just wondering if Adoramapix has promotions like it seems MyPublisher and Shutterfly do? I’ve been trying to figure out whicih company will give me good quality without costing a fortune. Thanks!